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Review by Christopher Coleman |
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What can I say about the Wii that hasn't already been repeatedly said on the interweb? It's tiny, it's fun, it's inclusive, it's white, it's sexy, it's cheap, and it's fun. I said fun twice because that can't be emphasised enough - it's fun. Remember when you were a kid and you played a video game? The sense of awe, the rush of "how cool is this?" emotion flowing through your veins, making it incredibly hard for you to do anything but grin idiotically? You're going to get that feeling again with the Wii, trust your Uncle Christopher on this. Allow me to tell you a tale. Once upon a time, there was a video game collector who was a big fan of value for money. He never bought a console on release - he was always a generation or two behind. The only times he was ever even current with a generation of consoles was when he'd traded for a Playstation way back in the day, or been given a PS2 or GameCube for Christmas by adoring parents. Once, he saved up enough cash to buy a Dreamcast on launch day, but what did he do? Take one look at a discounted PS1 game shelf and use that money to practically empty it into a giant box full of happy. News of the Wii spread far and wide across the Earth, and our game collector became strongly desirous of said wonderful console. Not only did he want it because it sounded cool, but because the price appealed to him compared to other "next gen" consoles, and because he'd never actually been in on the ground floor before. He'd never been an "early adopter". He'd been a big fan of "putting quotes around phrases" in his writing for some time, though. Is that enough of the "new games journalism" for you, or shall I start talking about the matter in hand? The System, including Wii Sports The console itself, at least in Australia, comes with a composite cable (urgh, nasty. Many thanks to my bestest pal NFG for arranging to get me a component cable from Japan), a Wiimote and nunchuck, the sensor bar, a console stand and Wii Sports. Wii Sports comes in a proper full sized white DVD case with inlay in PAL territories, by the way - I hear the US/Canada release only has Wii Sports in a chintzy cardboard sleeve. Before you even grace the disc slot with media, there are a number of things you can do. Get yourself a wireless access point (or attempt to get hold of a LAN cable adaptor that's compatible with it, there are a few identified already) and you can.. well, after a couple system updates.. use the Forecast Channel to check out weather around the world, complete with a rotating globe that looks rather cool, or you can look at the News Channel, which isn't currently available in Australia, or you can go to the Wii Shop. At the moment, you can either buy games for the Virtual Console, or you can download a free trial version of the Opera internet browser. Virtual Console allows the Wii to emulate (at the moment) five different older console systems - NES, SNES, N64, MegaDrive/Genesis and TurboGrafx 16/PC Engine. Each territory has different games available for the different systems, but at the moment the releases are a bit thin on the ground in Australia. You can pick up Super Mario 64, Urban Champion, Tennis, Golden Axe, Gunstar Heroes and a few others. The price varies per system, but they work out to between $AUS5 and $AUS15 here. Probably around the same price you'd pay at a pawn shop or indie game store if you saw the physical carts. Payment is via Wii points, which can be purchased with a credit card or via gift card style technology. As far as I know, the cards aren't available in shops yet here in Australia, but they shouldn't be far off. The Opera browser is pretty neat-o. It works quite well with the Wiimote, allowing you to use the + and - buttons to cycle between standard scaled view (web page scaled to fit on screen) and zoomed in (text actually readable). Holding in the trigger button lets you scroll in whatever direction you like, and hitting links is easy enough - the Wiimote rumbles a little and makes a click noise as you move over and hit one. I checked out a number of different sites - wii.com, the opera page, a LiveJournal community, even played a couple embedded YouTube video clips - everything worked great, although for some reason, the Australian gamespot website completely hung the console to the point I had to yank the cable and plug it back in. That brings me to another of the console's features - it's always in standby mode, but you can actually take advantage of this by enabling something called WiiConnect 24. If your wireless access point is always live, you can leave the console in this mode, and while it is in standby mode overnight, it can download any necessary updates or messages from friends or Miis or what have you. It remains to be seen how useful or fraught with difficulty this will be, but it's certainly a feature with a lot of potential. A Mii is actually an avatar you can create - quite detailed features, cartoony style - it's an interesting way of customising your game experience. If you design one in the Mii Channel and set it as your favourite, it comes up as Player 1 in whatever game you're playing - for example, it will appear as your player in Wii Sports or Wii Play. Of course, the game has to be designed to use the feature, but no doubt a lot of the first party Nintendo titles will use it for sure, if no others. You can set your Miis to wander, meaning they'll be sent to other friends' consoles. You can register other Wii consoles when given their 16 digit ID codes, which works similarly to the functionality with the DS. Did I mention that the Wii is backwardly compatible with the GameCube? It has a GC memory card slot, and if you pop a panel on the side (or top, if you're using the stand), there's four GameCube controller ports. I tried it with a Mickey Mouse game, and it looked absolutely gorgeous with the component cable, let me tell you. Here's the most amazingnest part: It has onboard memory and a SD slot. Nintendo didn't use a proprietary format for their storage! Whoa! What's that all about? I suppose it would've been nice to have a hard drive onboard, but if you can afford to download so much Virtual Console stuff that you're going to fill a hard drive, perhaps you should just buy all the original consoles and games and hire some scantily clad French maids to bring you the cartridges and plug them in for you, then pack the systems away when you're done. Wii Sports This is amazingly fun, and no doubt is going to contribute a lot to more widespread acceptance of video gaming. Is your sweater knitting aunt going to look at "Resistance Fall of Man" or "Gears of War" and think "Wow, video games, what have I been missing out on all these years?" or "Hey, bowling, that's neat, and I don't have to wear those skanky red shoes at the real alley!" Actually, she's probably thinking "Where's the sherry?" and "I'm going to die alone", but that's not important right now. Wii Sports includes a number of games, including golf, tennis, baseball, bowling and boxing. Golf Nine holes of ball slappin' goodness with up to four players. You're always aligned with the correct direction to hit the ball, so all you have to do is concentrate on your swing strength and selecting the right club. Putting is a little more involved, in that you have to line up your shot before swinging away. It's not a million miles away from a fully fledged golf game, but if you're a fan of the sport at all, this will definitely give you a desire for something like, say, Tiger Woods 2007. Tennis A vastly simplified version of tennis - your player automatically moves to the right position to return the ball. All you have to do is use the right swing to connect with the ball and send it in the right direction. You also might want to try and avoid hitting the guy you're playing against with the Wiimote. Fun for sure, but again, not a serious tennis simulation, and it was never meant to be. Baseball Another fun one - you can either bat or pitch, catching is automatic - you swing the Wiimote like a real bat, and pitching works similarly, except you press a button before making the pitching motion to determine what kind of pitch you're making. Bowling Bowling is probably the real winner amongst all the sport games you get on this disc - up to four players all swinging the Wiimote just as if it was a real bowling ball. I love it to bits, but then I spent 45 minutes playing Atari 2600 Bowling when I first got that, too. Would you expect anything less from someone whose favourite movie is "The Big Lebowski"? Boxing This one is a great concept, but in practice it didn't seem to work all that well - half the motions I'd make didn't seem to register properly. Perhaps I'm a crazy monkey man with incredibly uncoordinated movements, or perhaps it just doesn't work as well as you'd hope. Still, the potential's there, and maybe a dedicated effort to a boxing specific game will take it to the next level. As well as simply playing the games for what they are, there are also training modes where you can perform specific exercises to unlock more exercises and eventually make achievements - gold, silver or bronze medals. An example would be a home run contest in the baseball game, or putting exercises in golf. Wii Play Available at launch in Australia, this is actually a two pack - in the one package, for a little more than the price of a Wiimote by itself - both a Wiimote and the game Wii Play. Wii Play is a series of minigames, essentially strung together to form a tutorial on how to use the Wiimote. The games increase in complexity of control as you progress, getting you used to moving on the different axes (forward, backward, up, down, tilting, rotating) and the different styles of play. The minigames include:
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If this was released as a full price, or even half price, title by itself, it'd be rather disgustingly low value, but as it stands, it's awesome if you wanted an extra Wiimote anyway. I'm surprised this wasn't the pack-in and Wii Sports made a separate title, or packaged with a Wiimote instead, but then in Japan, Wii Sports wasn't packed in with the console either, and Wii Sports probably wouldn't really hold up as a full price game by itself either. As far as longevity goes, I'm finding myself coming back to it to play the light gun minigame, and the occasional bout of table tennis or laser hockey. Roll on a Point Blank conversion to Wii, I say. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess Yeah, it's brilliant, go buy it. I could say anything I liked here about the game and a huge percentage of you would buy it with the system. I did, and I didn't even care all that much about most previous Zelda games. Wind Waker on GC? Bored me. OK, the real reason I bought Zelda with it is because Call of Duty 3 was already sold out, but let's not tell any Zelda fans that. Let's see: looks gorgeous, plays pretty well, has fishing in it, and .. err.. yeah, go buy it. You know you want to. Have I mentioned I'm jealous of the crazy Americans getting a hardback edition of the guidebook? All we seem to be getting here is a (ridiculously overpriced) standard paperback thing. Am I the only one put off by guides being $AUS30+ here when the whole game is maybe $AUS80-90? To put that into perspective, a can of Coke is around $AUS1.50, a Big Mac meal is around $AUS7 and carnal relations with your mother are around $AUS20. Need for Speed: Carbon Urgh. I was pleasantly surprised by this on Christmas morning, as I wasn't expecting to get it - but that pleasantness didn't last as far as trying the game itself. Perhaps I'm being overly harsh, but the in game graphics don't really look very much better than the Xbox version (note I didn't say Xbox 360 version). The cut scenes look amazing, but who cares? The game play itself wasn't fun, but I'm definitely not being fair here. It takes a fair bit of getting used to using the Wiimote on its side as a steering device, and I didn't put in enough time to get there. Also, to be fair, the game includes five different control interfaces, which is pretty thorough, so if I experimented with one of those, I might get happier. Carbon is yet more of the rice boy fantasy crap that EA's been pumping out lately. The advance in this one is wingmen - other cars in the races that're on your side. You can direct them to scout out shortcuts or ram competitors off the road. Big whoop, really. This might end up being the best racing game available on Wii at the moment, but only because the competitors are GT Series Pro and Monster Trucks, neither of which are getting anywhere close to decent reviews in the media. Excite Truck is supposed to be the dog's bollocks, but it's not out here in Australia until February. I'd be able to tell you first hand what GT Series Pro is like, as it was the preorder bonus for placing my preorder at a particular department store here, but the utter, utter, utter, utter bastards still haven't had any stock in yet. The system launched December 7th here, and I still don't have the game. Not that I'm bitter. Call of Duty 3 Who here likes killing Germans? I mean in video games, you sick bastards. I've been a fan of World War 2 based first person shooters since the original Medal of Honour game came out on PlayStation 1. That was a Christmas present I got way, way back in the day, and .. well, the cycle of fun continues, as I got COD3 for Wii for Christmas this year! Yay for me! I was most excited by COD3 for Wii when I saw a trailer - the trailer not only showed the in game footage, but also the control method. I couldn't get over the fact you used motions with the Wiimote and nunchuck to do various tasks. The shot of whoever-it-was cranking the nunchuck in a circular motion to change the elevation of an artillery piece is what really sold me on wanting the game badly. Yes, I realize its all "gimmicks", but what you call a gimmick, I call a cool form of immersion in the game. The other console versions still have the same features, but what's the fun in pressing buttons A, B or X instead of actually moving the controller around? The reality of the game is.. well, mixed so far. There's no multiplayer whatsoever, which certainly is a black mark against it, and a guarantee of minimized replay value. The graphics are still pretty impressive, but only if you're comparing them to what you've seen on a GC or Xbox. They're not in the same league as the PS3 or XB360 versions you've no doubt seen by now. You might have also noticed the difference in price between the Wii and the PS3 or XB360, and also perhaps realized that graphics don't make a game any more fun to play, but that's enough sermonising for now. The basic controls work pretty well - movement with the nunchuck, aiming with the Wiimote. Moving the nunchuck in different directions also swaps weapons, makes you jump, etc. It works well enough once you're used to it, and there's a training bit at the beginning before the game proper starts. The problem I've hit? The melee bit is too hard. I tried to get past it about a dozen times before giving up and playing something else - the screen gives you no feedback on whether you're moving the controllers correctly or not. Believe me, I'm most certainly not giving up on the game entirely after such a brief bit of progress, as it still looks like fun, but I also hope that the other interactive parts of the game aren't so hit and miss. A friend of mine in the US gave me some advice on this melee business - "shake them like you're trying to dislocate your shoulders". Hmmm. Red Steel Good, old fashioned fun. A lot of the press, and a few people I know, have been deriding this game. Not enough innovation, bad AI, bad graphics, poor cut scenes, their mothers dressed the developers funny, etc, etc, but I've found myself playing this game the most of all of the games I have so far. It's, dare I say it, a lot of fun. The control interface works really well, the cheesy lines are amusing - how can you not love a game where they yell "you'll regret that!" and "murderer!" at you while simultaneously trying to machine gun you to death? - and the addition of sword fighting to the standard FPS hi-jinks really make it a great experience. Sure the Wii controls are a "gimmick" and a "novelty", but they're also really solid and easy to use. The sword fighting isn't really hugely accurate and detailed, it's more of a swing-wildly-and-see-how-you-go type affair, which admittedly gets more involved as you progress, but that fits in perfectly with the nature of the mow 'em down game play for the shooty bits. I'm not sure if it's worth full tilt retail, and I doubt it'll end up in the pantheon of Great Wii Releases Of All Time, but I find it hard to believe that anyone who likes a console FPS without being overly anal about it would have anything but a good time playing it. Hell, even if you hate the game, the awful accents and cheese ball script will have you in stitches, gaijin sucka!
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